Program and Proceedings:

Workshop Description:

The Semantic Web is a major world-wide endeavour to advance the Web by
enriching its content with semantic meta-information that can be
processed by inference-enabled Web applications. Ontologies and automated
reasoning are key techniques in the semantic web initiative.

Rules are considered to be a major issue in the further development of
the semantic web. On one hand, they can be used in ontology languages,
either in conjunction with or as an alternative to description logics.
And on the other hand, they will act as a means to draw inferences, to
express constraints, to specify policies, to react to events/changes,
to transform data, etc.

Finally, rule markup languages will allow to enrich web
ontologies by adding definitions of derived concepts, to publish rules
on the Web, to exchange rules between different systems and tools, etc.

The workshop builds on the success of the first workshop RuleML2002 (http://2002.ruleml.org) held
in conjunction with ISWC2002 on Sardinia, Italy,
and the second workshop (http://2003.ruleml.org)
held in conjunction with ISWC2003 on Sanibel Island, USA.
This year's workshop combines that tradition, in the sense of being the premier RuleML-2004 event, with casting as wide a net as possible regarding all kinds of Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web.

Topics of Interest:

We encourage submissions on all topics related to
rules and rule mark-up lanugages for the Semantic Web. In particular, the
workshop seeks papers addressing syntax and semantics of rule languages,
execution engines, implemented systems, and applications. Specifically:

Submission:

We invite articles of no more than 15 pages length formated
in Springer's LNCS
style (www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) describing original completed
work, work in progress, or interesting problems or use cases. Submitted papers
will be fully refereed based on the originality and significance of the ideas
presented as well as on technical aspects.

Semantic Web Rules: Covering the Use CasesMike Dean, BBN, USA
Rules represent the next step for the Semantic Web. A number of use cases
for Semantic Web Rules have been formally and informally proposed, including
ontology extension, ontology translation, data expansion, portable axiomatic
semantics, matching, monitoring, and profile and process descriptions for
Semantic Web Services. This talk will describe each of these use cases,
provide examples, and assess the degree to which each are addressed by the
Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) and other current alternatives.

Combining Rule and Ontology Reasoners for the Semantic WebChristine Golbreich, Laboratoire d'Informatique Mdicale, Universit Rennes 1, France
Using rules in conjunction with ontologies is a major challenge for the Semantic Web.
We propose a pragmatic approach for reasoning with ontologies and rules,
based on the Semantic Web standards and tools currently available.
We first achieved an implementation of SWRL,
the emerging OWL/RuleML-combining rule standard, using the Protg OWL plugin.
We then developed a Protg plugin, SWRLJessTab,
which enables to compute inferences with the Racer classifier and the Jess inference engine,
in order to reason with rules and ontologies, both represented in OWL. A small example,
including an OWL ontology and a SWRL rule base, shows that all the domain knowledge,
i.e. the SWRL rule base and the OWL ontology, is required to obtain complete inferences.
It illustrates that some reasoning support must be provided to interoperate between SWRL and OWL,
not only syntactically and semantically, but also inferentially.